Posts Tagged ‘Pittsburgh’

I love a lot of things about Pittsburgh. There’s food and art and science and nature and more, but there are things that rocket up to the top of that list as easy favorites. Bridges. Pierogies. Dinosaurs all over the place. But mostly, and you’ll hear this all over the country, its the people.

Long ago, in an effort to standardize city names, President Benjamin Harrison signed a declaration that meant all of the Pittsburghs in the U.S. — and there were several — would lose their “H”. “Pittsburgh” would become “Pittsburg”. But the people in the Pittsburg in Pennsylvania were having none of that silliness, and so after a lengthy public campaign by her citizenry, we got our “H” back.

One could say that the resistance to conform was old-fashioned, against the tide of progress. I see it as one more way that the people of the region recognized their identity and clung to it, fought for it, government mandates be damned.